Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Knuth Prize to Strassen

The ACM announced that Volker Strassen will receive the Knuth Prize for his algorithmic work, most notably on primality, matrix multiplication and integer multiplication. The Knuth Prize is given for major contributions over an extended period of time. The winner gives a Knuth Prize lecture and Strassen will give his at SODA.

Strassen matrix multiplication is a simple but amazing recursion to beat the easy cubic bound. And the probabilistic algorithm for primality with Solovay drove complexity research into probabilistic computation and helped make modern cryptography possible.